Occurrence Type Classification for Establishing Prevention Plans Based on Industrial Accident Cases Using the KoBERT Model

With increasing industrial sophistication and complexity, workplaces are increasingly prone to occupational accidents, causing negative impacts on workers and employers, including economic losses and decreased productivity. South Korea occupational safety and health has implemented new policies addressing potential risks to overcome stagnation in industrial accident reduction and predict site accidents from past cases. Cases are human-classified according to rules, including occurrence type or original causal materials. However, human errors, subjective judgments, synonyms, and terms incorrectly used by classifiers reduce original data quality and impede developments or applications of policies, technologies, and methods preventing accidents based on past accidents. This study proposes three artificial intelligence models to objectively classify the occurrence type of accident cases. Models are developed based on a natural language processing model (KoBERT), which considers Korean language characteristics. Each model is tested by sequentially performing sentence preprocessing, keyword replacement, and morphological analysis. The proposed Model 3 exhibits 93.1% accuracy, which was the highest among tested models. Up to three classification categories for occurrence type are allowed to assist objective classification. The accident case-based occurrence type classification model is effective for industrial accident prevention, aiding in strategy development and reducing social costs.